Author of Spirit Wind and Walk Against Time

R

This is a film that is uncertain of its genre. It starts out and has the feel throughout of a slice of life movie, yet, underneath, a great tragedy is struggling to get out, and, at the end, it bursts into a kind of feel-good film.

This 1994 movie, written by Helen Childress and directed by Ben Stiller, touches on a number of issues for young people, including attachment to brands, rejection of previous generations, employment difficulties, and romantic angst. Highly successful at the time, much of the movie can be said to be just as valid for today’s young adults as it was when released.

A nation of Peeping Toms. That’s us, according to home care nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter) in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 masterpiece Rear Window. She’s complaining to photographer L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart) as he sits in his wheelchair staring out the rear window of his apartment in Greenwich Village.

The violent colors of autumn leaves, an iron-rich rock that turns water blood red, blackened stalks, great slabs of ice, thorns, chipped rocks: these are the materials that Andy Goldsworthy uses to create his ephemeral art.

This classic romantic comedy is as much fun today as it was when the film was first released in 1953. It is built around two lies of identity told to each other by the main characters so that they can spend a day together in Rome.

Ruby Sparks

Ruby Sparks is a brilliant 2012 romantic fantasy. Both a comedy and a drama, it never falls into the genre of romantic comedy, but blazes its own original, fantastic trail. Written by Zoe Kazan and directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the film has a single, organic arc that shoots into the sky like a brilliant firework, ultimately exploding into fragments that all make perfect sense.